1 / 44 句0 词已学
【阅读理解】Reading: The Khaen Maker's Contract
In 2003, I was a twenty-four-year-old reporter with a $1,200 grant, searching for a story about disappearing folk tunes in Luang Prabang.
A narrow lane behind a temple wall led to Uncle Somchai's workshop, where motorbikes had to slouch past hanging laundry.
Somchai was fifty-eight, a maker of the traditional khaen, a bamboo mouth organ whose sound can be as soft as breath or as sharp as a cry.
When he saw my notebook, he said in a low voice, 'You are late. The last master died in 1997. I am just a repairman.'
Then he played, and the room filled with a melody that seemed to originate from the floorboards themselves.
For three weeks I visited every morning. Somchai had learned to make the khaen from his father, who had learned from a monk in a village now under water.
The rising Mekong had submerged eleven villages between 1990 and 2002, and with them, a whole vernacular of courtship songs and funeral relays.
Somchai showed me the tensile strength of bamboo strips, the precise alignment of eight pipes, the way a single droplet of beeswax could alter a tune.
'You have to respect the grain,' he said. 'If you force it, the sound will behave like a bird with a broken wing.'
He worked with a slothful patience that I first mistook for weakness. But it was a kind of physical philosophy.
Each stroke of his knife was a decision, not a habit. He had been diagnosed with diabetes in 1999, and his eyesight was failing, yet he refused to let anyone else cut the bamboo.
'The instrument must carry my intention,' he said. 'Otherwise it is just a commodity.'
By 2005, I had published a short piece in a Bangkok magazine. The response was generous but small. And then the money came.
A cultural foundation offered Somchai $8,000 to record an album. A hotel chain wanted to use his music for a lobby. A tour company proposed a 'living heritage' show with lights and costumes.
Somchai accepted the recording grant but turned down the rest. 'They want a symbol,' he said. 'Not a sound.'
Then, in 2006, a fire swallowed his workshop. The cause was a loose electrical cord. He lost twenty-three instruments, his father's notebooks, and most of his hearing in the left ear.
The police report mentioned no foul play. Somchai called it a consequence of neglect. 'The city is unyielding,' he said. 'It does not hate you. It simply does not care.'
The insurance paid $2,100. He spent it on a new roof.
After the fire, something in him shifted. He grew irritable. He began to drink rice whiskey in the afternoon and to rant about a 'malevolent' government that would rather build a casino than preserve a single song.
But he also started to teach. Nine students came, then four stayed. A sixteen-year-old girl named Khamla was the most stubborn.
She had a scar on her chin and an attitude that could split a room. Somchai called her 'the saint of contradiction.'
He taught her to make reeds from a special bamboo that grows only above 600 meters altitude. He taught her that a khaen is not a possession but an association, a contract between breath and bamboo.
'You do not own the tune,' he told her. 'You are a guest in its house.'
In 2008, he sent Khamla to a competition in Vientiane. She won second place. The first-place winner played a synthesis of folk melody and electronic beats. The judges called it 'up-to-date.' Somchai called it 'a murder of silence.'
In 2010, a Japanese ethnomusicologist arrived with a team of four and a budget of $50,000. They wanted to record everything — the workshop, the river, the temple bells, the conversation of birds.
They offered Somchai a fee of $300 per day. He refused to be recorded indoors. 'Take only what the wind allows,' he said.
So they set up microphones on a wooden pier. For six days, Somchai played and talked and cried. He spoke about his wife, who had died in pregnancy in 1988.
He spoke about a recurring dream in which he was a young man again, chasing a girl through a field of straw.
On the seventh day, he played a tune he had never played before. It lasted eleven minutes.
The engineer later called it 'superb, but unpublishable' — too long, too raw, too full of coughs and boat engines. Somchai shrugged. 'That is the recording,' he said. 'The rest is just merchandising.'
Khamla now runs a small school in a slum on the edge of Vientiane.
Questions
1. What did Somchai accept from the offers made to him after the Bangkok magazine piece?
A. A hotel chain's request to use his music in a lobby. B. A tour company's proposal for a 'living heritage' show. C. A cultural foundation's grant to record an album. D. A Japanese team's offer to record his workshop indoors.
2. What happened to Somchai's workshop in 2006?
A. It was flooded by the rising Mekong. B. It was destroyed by a fire caused by a loose electrical cord. C. It was sold to a hotel chain. D. It was rebuilt with $8,000 from a foundation.
3. What does the word 'slothful' in paragraph 6 most likely mean?
A. Extremely fast and efficient. B. Slow and unhurried. C. Strong and forceful. D. Careless and messy.
4. Why did Somchai refuse to be recorded indoors by the Japanese team?
A. He did not trust the Japanese engineer. B. He wanted to be paid more than $300 per day. C. He was too ill to sit inside for long periods. D. He believed the recording should include only natural sounds allowed by the wind.
5. Which of the following best describes the main idea of the passage?
A. The effects of a fire on a small community in Luang Prabang. B. The competition between traditional and modern music in Laos. C. A reporter's journey to document a disappearing musical tradition. D. The life of a khaen maker who resisted commercialization and valued intention in his craft.